Divorce (2016)

Divorce simply has more to unpack than can be summed up in a singularly strong concept. It’s the overall experience that hits hardest, and while delving into heartbreak may not be something we’re all eager to become immersed in, the series’ value on levels both informational and artistic is hard to deny.

Divorce is raw and uncomfortable at times... but it’s also one of the best new comedies of the year.

With the help of her stellar cast, creator Sharon Horgan (“Catastrophe”) manages to find plenty of humor in domestic turmoil.

Divorce struggles at first with tone, leavened somewhat by comically absurd supporting characters (including “Saturday Night Live” alum Molly Shannon as a friend of Frances’s who pulls a gun on her own husband during a 50th birthday party). ... Divorce is best when it sticks to its title.

In this skillfully conceived series the characters never fail to remind us of the forces that drive them, and no one does it better or more compellingly than Thomas Haden Church as Robert, a man in chaos hurling his many selves around, all of them infused with his absurdity and raging wit.

Horgan and showrunner Paul Simms, clearly working closely with Parker, who’s one of the show’s executive producers, have constructed Divorce so that it feels at once inevitable and surprising.

HBO's other new Sunday comedy Insecure is more consistent and sure of its voice, but I laughed a lot more watching Divorce, even as I kept feeling frustrated that it didn't seem willing to fully embrace the awfulness of its premise, or its entire cast of characters. To be as good as it can be, it has to be more willing to be bad.

The laugh-out-loud viciousness of the opening, which involves both a gun and vomit, is clearly the work of series’ creator Sharon Horgan, who also co-writes and stars in Amazon’s brilliant Catastrophe. But Divorce isn’t always as biting as it is in those moments, leading to a solidly acted but somewhat mundane exploration of a breakup.

Divorce is very much going to be an acquired taste. ... But I also think Divorce has something interesting to say about the marriages of people who stay together not for love, or for the kids, but for their money.

Marriage and its trials and tribulations emerge as something of its own character as the show presses on.

It grows into something less brittle--and funnier--over the six I've seen, as the couple explore their increasingly unpalatable options and we get to know them better.

It’s an intelligent, if sometimes taxing or manipulative show, well played, often funny, here and there lovely; it improves as it goes along, letting us get to like characters who can first seem a little hateful.

Divorce casts Parker in an unsympathetic role. It’s not Parker’s comfort zone.

Divorce is another new series that meanders through its salient points in eight episodes when it could have boiled them down to six or four, or packed them into an incident-filled two-hour film.

It’s hard to see what Frances saw in Robert that made her love him at some point, which, along with some crazy incidents, gives Divorce the sheen of absurd, heightened reality as opposed to a show that feels real.

Divorce is not as dewy-eyed as its forebear, not as fresh in its material, and in its first outings, not as consistently funny. But it can be a caustic pleasure, a chaser, heavy on the bitters, to Carrie’s fruity cosmo.

Divorce is a smarter and more ambitious show than that and it wants to soak in the emotions, which is more admirable than watchable (especially because Parker is the one marinating in the sadness, not getting many of the funny or withering lines).

Though the central relationship is captivating, Divorce makes missteps with its comedy.

Divorce makes you feel almost nothing. It’s a shallow bore, and not even the flailing efforts of its stars make it interesting.

This show details the death of a marriage by a thousand cuts, a few hundred insults and a bag of clothes thrown in the trash. Maybe that’s your appointment TV. I’d rather binge watch root canal videos on YouTube.

The major characters, one and all, are extremely well acted, but the winter of their middle-age discontent produces a comedy that leaves the viewer a little cold.

It would seem that Horgan has a fixation on anxiety-inducing titles, but “Catastrophe” has an upbeat pulse that permeates its humor that is sorely lacking in Divorce. ... [The] best scenes in Divorce aren’t carried by Parker, which is a shame and an error, considering her role as the center of this off-kilter miniature galaxy. Instead, Church generates most of the comedy in the show’s opening episodes, which is terrific.

Parker’s performance in Divorce, especially in the early episodes, before she’s given a few spazzy speeches, is about as close to a dramatic one as is possible for appearing in a comedy. Her commitment to keeping everything tamped down unsettles a series in which everyone else is playing a game of outsized emotional charades.

The humor in Divorce is so bleak and the characters are so toxic that you may crave a "Silkwood" shower afterward.That's not to say there aren't funny lines or excellent performances by the core cast of Parker, Haden Church, and Molly Shannon and Tracy Letts as the awful friends whose mutual meltdown at a party sparks Parker's Frances to ask for a divorce. Trouble is, they feel like performances from different shows.

The show aims for emotional realism one minute, farce the next, and sitcom-like goofing the next, and it all never quite hangs together naturally.

Divorce in the early going is not just dark but also slow and mopey--sometimes downright depressing.

This is a star vehicle determined to put us on the side of that star, despite the horrible things she sometimes says and does. And the only way to do that is to make Robert a buffoon, and everyone else unbearable.

Parker’s good, but otherwise Divorce is sullen and sodden.

As it stands, the series is stuck in neutral, between caring about what happens to these people and wanting to see them tear each other to shreds for sport.

The first six episodes of the show have their moments (and at least an ever-present Molly Shannon-slash-Sarah Jessica Parker gal pal angle), but it’s mostly a downward spiral of negativity and regret that could have been a powerhouse dramedy, but lacks a deft of emotion (or humor) to make the ennui worth it.

Almost everything about the show feels clunky, even forced.

Parker and Church are both solid actors, but there’s never any sense that Frances and Robert ever had any love or passion for each other, even at some point in the past. Every time they reminisce about their former life together, it rings false.

Divorce can be raw, funny, and uncomfortable, but whereas Catastrophe has a warmth to it, Divorce ultimately feels hollow.

Send back the cosmos and break out the crack pipes; this is industrial-strength despair.

It’s one of those shows filled from top to bottom with unlikable characters, often caught in situations that just don’t feel genuine. And the show is working in such an emotional minefield—the impact of divorce on a family—that if the writing and performances don’t feel truthful than it just comes off mean-spirited and misanthropic.